Magic and sanitation

[Celebrim]

At the risk of introducing a buzzword into the discussion, this is why simulations is an important consideration to maintain in terms of game design, as it dovetails strongly with world-building.

To put this in Forge-speak terms, the way I tend to think about this is considering these simulationist elements in your game design basically never harms a gamist or narrativist agenda. For example, if you feel the need to give magic users an at will magical attack, as long as you considered gamist elements like combat balance you aren't going to strongly impact simulation as armies of magic users wouldn't necessarily be inherently better than armies of other classes. Maybe you provide for the existence of armies of other classes, but you don't demand it. Likewise, it's not like the simulationists are going to demand you ignore game balance, because ignoring game balance also impacts the simulation. Nor does having internally consistent setting logic harm the ability to tell an exciting story, and indeed I'd argue that it tends to help it by helping you avoid fridge logic that shows up so much in bad writing where the writer introduces technobabble and deus ex machina as a way to write themselves out of writing traps that the retroactively undermine the story.

But if you ignore the simulation, you not only don't help your other agendas, but are removing a pillar of play from your system that can't easily be replaced. You no longer have a game system that can service the agendas of diverse tables, and I'd argue that what tends to make a game system enduring is its ability to accommodate different agendas by adopting different processes of play.

 

[Bohandas]

My headcanon is that there's some kind of Baatezu conspiracy that keeps these societies from advancing to where they should be. Some sinister force whispering regressive ideas into the ears of the higher-ups in society "if we feed everyone by magic, what will happen to the farmers? What will happen to the peaceful rural lifestyle?" (..."if the Jacquard loom takes off, so many weavers will lose their jobs" "taking one minute to copy this disk is like stealing from the person who made it" "If AI is allowed to make art, what will happen to artists?"...) etc. while also lending muscle to evil conspiracies along the lines of the Phoebus Cartel.

I could imagine some baatezu equivalent to a modern luddite or IP troll whipping up an angry mob of bakers and fishermen against a miracle worker trying to feed a crowd with five loaves and two fishes. "You don't have the right to duplicate that bread! You're stealing from the bakers!"

 

[Celebrim]

My headcanon is that there's some kind of Baatezu conspiracy that keeps these societies from advancing to where they should be. Some sinister force whispering regressive ideas into the ears of the higher-ups in society "if we feed everyone by magic, what will happen to the farmers? What will happen to the peaceful rural lifestyle?"

There are real world equivalents to that. For example, the Romans were familiar with water wheels but they avoided using them whenever possible because they were worried that labor saving devices would render slavery non-productive. As southern Europe had lots of manpower, there was never a big push toward industrialization. It wasn't until the 12th century that Northern Europe, with big labor shortfall and less social resistance to ending slavery that you saw widespread adoption and innovation in labor saving industrial processes.

Steam industrialization produced massive backlash as well, but I can't talk about that much because we are still living the backlash. But it's worth noting parallels in the ideological response to steam industrialization in the late 18th and 19th centuries, and the ideological response to the growth of paid laborers (as opposed to serfs and labor as a form of taxation) and water and wind power in the 13th century. Details up to the interested student of Medieval History.

Nonetheless, I don't really think that this works as an explanation for a typical fantasy world. There are too many different actors with access to the same technology, too much freedom, too few slaves, too much long-distance travel to see alternative ways of doing things, too many books, etc. This is something the regressive conspiracy has to universally nip in the bud across all cultures, because if it fails with just one culture then it fails. And so it can't be a subtle thing. You need a pogram to purge all the innovation out of society on a regular basis. You need the 1e AD&D magic hating barbarians rampaging across the whole planet every few decades. There are examples of societies that did something like that to themselves in the real world, but again, can't go into them here because we are still not enough centuries removed from the issue, but notably the fact that not every culture made that choice made it almost irrelevant that some did.

 

[Bohandas]

I am routinely shocked and saddened when contestants on Um, Actually -- including major D&D nerds like Brennan Lee Mulligan and Matt Mercer -- are unfamiliar with classic fantasy novels that originally shaped Dungeons & Dragons. If they've never read those books -- or even heard of them, in some cases -- I don't think we can expect the game's baselines to remain in sync with them.

I haven't followed this. Do you mean they're unfamiliar with the obscure ones like Vance, or that they're unfamiliar with even the famous ones like Tolkien or the Howard/Clarke/Lovecraft/Bloch circle

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I haven't followed this. Do you mean they're unfamiliar with the obscure ones like Vance, or that they're unfamiliar with even the famous ones like Tolkien or the Howard/Clarke/Lovecraft/Bloch circle

Not an actual Appendix N book, but it should be, and it's the first example I can think of at the moment, but a question about the Wizard of Earthsea completely stumped both the contestants and the host a few months ago, which made me want to weep.

 

[Bohandas]

There are real world equivalents to that. For example, the Romans were familiar with water wheels but they avoided using them whenever possible because they were worried that labor saving devices would render slavery non-productive.

This neatly illustrates the motive for why the baatezu might want to keep society backwards. The more backwards a society is, the more dependent it will be on the power of lawful evil just to function.

However, do you have a reference for this. This doesn't seem to add up as a motivation that mortals would have.

Did you mean that the slave traders specificalky were worried that it would make slavery obsolete? I can't imagine who else would be bothered by slavery being obsolete; The owners make their money either way so they shouldn't be bothered.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Did you mean that the slave traders specificalky were worried that it would make slavery obsolete?

The US didn't invent lobbying.

 

[Bohandas]

It was inevitable, in retrospect, that magic would go all over. And that's not even counting the influence of fantasy fiction, movies, comics and especially anime, where the current generation of gamers are seeing ubiquitous magic as just the way fantasy looks and feels.

Don't forget horror. In many supernatural horror films and novels magic is often easy to use and therefore easy to misuse, or even to use accidentally. The Evil Dead series is a good example of this latter eventuality. In Evil Dead 1 the kandarian demons are summoned by a tape recorded incantation, and in Evil Dead 4 they're summoned when one of the characters casually tries to sound out a sentence in the Necronomicon.

 

[Faolyn]

Another pet peeve is D&D pantheons composed of deities no one would worship and who just plug into PC driven niches like "the god of thieves", "the god of fighters", "the god of paladins", "the god of magic users", "the god of druids', and even "the god of clerics" (side-eyes Lathlander).

To be fair, the Romans had a goddess of thieves, Laverna.

...The Romans had a lot of gods for very specific things.

 

[Celebrim]

To be fair, the Romans had a goddess of thieves, Laverna.

...The Romans had a lot of gods for very specific things.

I don't mind the concept of the "minor deity for everything". I tend to do that myself since it fits with typical polytheism. What I mind is that the only major deities and the deities that seem central to the worship life of the community aren't deities that have anything to do with the day-to-day life and concerns of the community, but instead are just a check list of "if your this class, this is your patron".